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Natural Wedding Spaces

This is the second in our 7 part blog mini series Real Wedding Favourites. Last time we featured our favourite Natural Wedding Styles (wedding dresses, accessories, bridesmaids dresses and more). Today we’ve scoured the Real Weddings to find our favourite ceremony spaces, wedding reception decor and a truly magical wedding venue.

As mentioned previously our picks are chosen from the very first Real Wedding we featured up until spring of this year. You can find all the links here to our Real Wedding Favourites.

Our Favourite Wedding Ceremony Spaces

I had two favourites for this category and I’ve decided to share them both.

A Wedding Ceremony on a Beach Amongst Chapel Ruins

The first of my favourite wedding ceremony spaces is this ruined chapel amongst the dunes of a Scottish beach. Sounds like something from a film doesn’t it?

Well this is where Jo and Dom had their wedding ceremony. They had a humanist ceremony amongst the ruins on a beach that bride Jo had grown up visiting. It was also where Dom proposed, so it had loads of special meaning to the couple. As if that wasn’t lovely enough, they followed it with a picnic on the beach and a swim!

Hay bales seem to be standing the test of time in terms of wedding decor and we can absolutely see why. As a relatively cheap and versatile option they can be both practical and decorative to use in creating a relaxed, country or festival vibe for your wedding day.

If you head on over to Pinterest you would be hard pushed to not come across some hay bale inspiration, we even have our own board dedicated to them. Throughout the years we have featured many weddings with hay bale seating and decor and provided previous posts on hay bale inspiration here, here, here, here and here. Today, however we thought we would provide you with some new inspiration and summarise some of our favourite uses. You’ll also hear from hay bale gurus Partybales along with our advice to help you with planning, how to source them, and how to incorporate hay bales into your wedding day.

We also have a special reader offer for those who’d like to buy the book – you’ll find all the details at the bottom of the post.

Book review of The Crafted Garden

I was a excited to receive this book based on the brief synopsis and beautiful cover alone, and although I will admit I was a tiny bit sceptical that it wouldn’t offer anything more than what I could find scouring Pinterest, I will say straight away now that my scepticism was unfounded!

The book has been cleverly put together and Louise clearly has a passion for the great outdoors and how you can incorporate it in your home, for a celebration or as a unique gift idea.

I approached the book from a wedding point of view (whilst also already planning how I was going to use each one some how in my home) and excitedly flicked through the pages thinking how each craft could be used or adapted for wedding décor, accessories, gifts and so on and how all the ideas could be adapted through the seasons.

Although some of the projects may seem simple or obvious, I was surprised at how I hadn’t ever thought of doing them before and it really makes you look around and consider the natural resources you have around you.

The book offers 50 crafting projects all inspired by nature and whether you are a crafting amateur or gardening pro it contains a plethora of information beautifully presented to make it easy to read and follow. Broken down into seasons, not only does it provide instructions on craft ideas but really useful tips such as guidelines for foraging ethically, how best to dry flowers (great for after your wedding if you wish to preserve yours) and the best seasonal flowers.

Autumnal wedding craft projects

To give you a little insight into a few of the fab craft ideas in the book we tested a few of the autumnal projects out to hopefully offer a bit of seasonal wedding decor inspiration.

I came across this idea today and think it’s a lovely way to decorate your wedding venue – especially if you have a lot of dull wall space to cheer up. The couple used embroidery hoops of varying sizes and done in different styles, with a piece of colourful ribbon to hang them from the windows of their wedding venue.

Embroidery hoop artwork has been quite trendy this year, with lots of Etsy sellers bringing us gorgeous designs (just search for embroidery hoop), and after your wedding would look equally beautiful in your own home. If there’s too many, you could always give them out as gifts to family and friends who helped with your wedding.

It feels like a while since I shared some pictures from weddings around the blog world that I find inspiring. If you’re new to the blog you’ll find out I’m all about down-to-earth weddings, those that looks beautiful but not because they’ve had tons of money thrown at them or are totally over-done in details.

There is just something about certain weddings that captures me for their simplicity and what I can only imagine is a trueness to the couple getting married. I loved this rustic American camp wedding, not only because of the beautiful setting – and I’m delighted that we’re getting more venues like this in the UK – but there is this ‘feel’ to this wedding that is very genuine.

I’m a huge fan of walking to the wedding ceremony as a group, which is something we chose to do with our guests, and I love that they were accompanied by musicians.

These pretty handcrafted corn hearts, lover’s knots and horseshoes are the latest items available from the Wedding in a Teacup online shop – aren’t they beautiful? I am always at risk of over-using the word ‘natural’ here, but I do love how ‘natural’ these items are, and according to Hester from Wedding in a Teacup they have centuries of British rural tradition behind them.

If you’re planning an autumn wedding I can’t imagine many things more lovely than these to decorate your ceremony or reception venue with. In fact, it was my family church decorated for the harvest festival that inspired how I wanted the church to feel for our wedding – among other details, they used two big milk churns outside filled with dried corn, we used those same milk churns but filled with cow parsley for our wedding. You could also give them as wedding favours.

I wish I could take credit for stumbling across they lovely origami hearts made from recycled paper, but it was the lovely Lizzie from Cornish Tipi Weddings who shared details of them and I just had to pass them onto you all. These ones are made from colourful catalogue and magazine pages, and I love how they’re all hung from different coloured ribbons.

There is a full how-to guide telling you how to make these recycled origami hearts on the original post, and think they would look lovely hung somewhere at your wedding – or just as Lizzie from Cornish Tipi Weddings said, hung from the trees around their woodland wedding pavilion.